Couples Travel Hack: My Day, Your Day

Though long-term travel has its advantages, physical and emotional challenges are plenty. It also involves quite a bit of continual planning and preparation. In order to better maintain our sanity and preserve our marriage while on the road, we’ve recently decided to return to a practice that we applied successfully while traveling through Europe for five months in 2000. This little life hack technique goes by different names, but we call it “My Day, Your Day.” Audrey reads up in the guidebook on her day.
Though we believe this practice is well-suited to traveling couples, it can be applied anywhere a laundry list of simple tasks, multiple parties and multiple sets of preferences compete for space.

This couples travel hack is simple. Here’s how we apply it:

1. Assign to each person the days he/she will “own” or be responsible for.

We alternate days. One day, Dan. The next day, Audrey. And so on. If you begin to lose track, you can divide days by odd and even numbers.

2. If it’s “your day,” you are:

a. ultimate arbiter on split decisions (a.k.a., “the decider” ☺)
b. responsible for making the hot potato decisions that neither person would like to make
c. responsible for managing the unloved – but absolutely necessary – details like navigating with the city map and negotiating transport for the day

Late morning ascent in Altyn Arashan, Kyrgyzstan.
For couples like us who tend to strenuously over-analyze the impact of insignificant decisions (e.g, whether we’ll go to Café Mutton or Café Goat for lunch), this solution impersonally assigns the responsibility of low-level decision-making to one person. For couples who can’t seem to find agreement and have frequently divergent preferences (e.g., “You’d like to do Mutton?!? Well, I’d like to do Goat!!”), this solution impersonally assigns privilege.

Take the Café Mutton vs. Café Goat lunch decision example. This decision, by the way, reflects much of our lunch selection reality while we traveled throughout Central Asia.

If it’s your day, and you…

feel strongly about Café Mutton while the other person feels strongly about Café Goat, you go to Café Mutton. After all, it’s “your day.”

are indifferent or are feeling generous, you can defer the decision to the other party. If the other party is likewise indifferent, the onus is on you to decide. Flip a coin if you must. Again, it’s “your day” and it's your responsibility to choose.

Obviously, we’ve chosen a very simple example for the purpose of demonstrating the concept and mechanism. We’re certain that all of our readers can use their imaginations to find some more complex examples in their own lives where this tool can find a comfy home.Smiling for the camera in front of Peak Lenin near the Kyrgyz-Tajik border.
Keep in mind, like any decision-making mechanism, this is not a panacea. Similarly, like any tool used to navigate a relationship, it's possible to misuse it to manipulate the other party. However, when used in good faith, “My Day, Your Day” really can work and help you re-focus on the larger issues…and the fun stuff. For those of you familiar with Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), it also allows “N's” (like us) to share the “S” work, thereby spreading the burden of managing those devilish details.

In general, we make most of our major decisions together. However, when insignificant decisions begin to pile up or take up undue time, “My Day, Your Day” can help put the spotlight on the process, depersonalize some of the conflict and cut more quickly to resolution and action.

A word of thanks goes out to my sister Kim. After all, she’s the one who introduced the concept to us before we got married and decided to hit the road for Europe seven years ago.

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About Daniel Noll

Travel and life evangelist. Writer, speaker, storyteller and consultant. Connecting people to experiences that will change their lives. Originally from the U.S. Daniel has lived abroad since 2001 and most recently has been on the road since 2006. When he's not writing for the blog you can keep up with his adventures on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and Instagram. And you can learn more about him on the About Page and on LinkedIn.

Comments

Beautiful, Audrey! As a fellow pair of N’s (my dad is a psychologist 🙂 ), I think we’ll give Kim’s concept a spin on our December trip to Key West and Miami. There’ll be a lot of driving, a lot of beaches, a lot of meals…in short, a lot of decisions. This system could be really fun — and a relief, as well!

The only real question is: Will there be a good place to get some goat?

Melanie: Although we’re both big travelers, neither of us relishes the detailed planning of travel so this system helps share the burden for both of us. Hope the system works for you…and I sincerely hope you’re not in a situation where you’ve got to eat goat!

That’s a fascinating system – one I’ve never heard of before. Obviously it would work better if it were always “My Day,” since all my decisions are perfect in every way and my wife is always wrong about everything, but since she’s shown a remarkable inability to understand this – and constantly brings up trivial details in argument, like “You’re always lost 100% of the time,” and “You lost your pants last week at a bar and are now naked” – this might be a good compromise.

About Us

We are Daniel Noll and Audrey Scott, the husband-and-wife storytelling team behind Uncornered Market. From the United States, based in Berlin, world-bound. Through our stories, advisory, and speaking we are creating a movement of travelers who live at the intersection of adventure, deep travel and life experiences, and caring for our planet and its people. More than 90 countries later, we are still going...and still married. Read More

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